Overview

Calico is an environment for scripting. It is composed of three main components:

Scripting Languages (like Ruby, Python and Scheme)

Scripting Editor

Libraries for doing things (like robotics and graphics)

Calico is designed so that you can swap out any component, and the other two components can remain the same.

First, you should have already installed Calico at the Calico Download page.

Starting

Normally, you can just double-click on the StartCalico icon in Windows, Mac, and Linux.

As a convenience, you might want to associate ".py" files with StartCalico, so that when you double-click a file, it opens it in Calico. Otherwise, you will need to start Calico, and then use menu -> File -> Open.

You can also start Calico up by running the ./StartCalico (Linux and Mac OSX) and StartCalico.bat (Windows) from the command console (also called terminal). You can pass a number of "flags" to Calico. Here we pass the --help flag to see what all of the options are:

Calico GUI

Calico is divided into two windows:

Editor

Shell and Output

The Editor allows you to edit files. From the editor, you can select a section of code and press F5 to run part of your script interactively. If you don't have anything high-lighted, pressing F5 will run the entire file.

In the interactive command box, you can enter as much code as you like, ENTER will evaluate the code in the box (you may have to press ENTER twice, if you have a multi-line expression).

Running Scripts

There are 5 widgets involved with running a script. From left to right they are:

Stop, stops the program

Run, starts the program

Speed slider, from (left) fast to single-step (right), with auto-pausing in between

Pause

Next/Resume step

These are used in the following ways:

To start running, with stepper or fast, you press the Run button

If the slider is far to left (fast) when you press the Run button, it runs regularly (no debugging)

If the slider is in the middle, then the debugger will run with an auto-pause on (between 0.1 and 1 second pause per line). You can press the Pause button at any time.

If the slider is on the far right, then it is in single-step mode. You can press the Next button to go to next line.

You can press the Pause button when slider is in middle, and the program is running

You can press the Next/Resume button when slider is in middle (resumes), or if slider is far-right (next)